A funny thing about forgetting your entire teenagehood can be the remembering. It’s so special to be safe; to remember how epic of a human being I was and had to be to endure The HorrorsTM. Complex PTSD is a career criminal, and a very dedicated one at that.
Last August I found a bunch of my old freelance pitches. The following essay was titled as Inner Circle HG. My first and most consistent freelance gig was with Hello Giggles, a now-defunct website founded by Zooey Deschanel in 2011. HG was “geared toward women, and covered topics in popular culture, love, friendship, careers, style, food, and daily news”. I am so reverent of the wisdom that I held then; the depth and the incompleteness, and so amused by how many times I would go on to think I got it (re: friends) before realizing that the whole thing of life is the continual getting it. Today’s essay is from a me in Johannesburg and survival mode, to you, and to a me very honored to have lived to this point.
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How I let go of the need for an inner circle
I’d always desperately clung to the idea of belonging to a group of friends. It’s not that I’d never had friends, but rather that I didn’t have them in one group. Yes, they were my inner circle, but they were so far removed. The joy of being in your early twenties [2026 edit: I WAS EIGHTEEN, and desperate to not be. Always surprised and impressed when I remember that I survived high school.] is that some friends are getting married, others are finishing college, and some people—like me—feel as though life is happening and all they can do is mourn it as it passes by. The changes happening in everyone’s lives threw me for a bit of a loop. I craved the sense of belonging that one feels with one’s inner circle, and felt clueless about how to go about achieving it.
Upon reflection, it presents as a bit of a juvenile issue. Maybe I just needed to grow up. (Spoiler alert: I did.) [2026 edit: Growing continues; thankfully time moves in that direction huh?] When I first described it to my therapist, she asked me if I felt that I needed a group because I thought my inner circle had failed me. I was uncharacteristically quiet for a while, and then changed the subject. Really, I thought about that question for the rest of the session and thereafter.
Had my inner circle failed me? To answer this, I had to dissect a couple of ideas that were fixed for me. First, what is an inner circle? To me, it meant the people who knew everything about me and had seen me at my most vulnerable. If they didn’t know about that one thing—you know, that thing about themselves that everyone only tells three people—then they were out. This, as expected, left very few people to have in my inner circle. [2026 edit: *stares in complex PTSD from severe child and narcissistic abuse*]
In a then-understandable, now somewhat overdramatic moment of despair, I found myself crying at my desk. I’d tried to write a list of those in my inner circle, but the page remained blank. I simply couldn’t think of any people who knew absolutely everything about me. My day turned into a teary evening filled with far too much ice cream for a Tuesday. I felt anxious and incredibly alone, struck with the realization that I had no inner circle.
This small crisis saw me reevaluating friendships on a level I didn’t recognize. Suddenly, I’d begun to wonder whether the people who were my friends knew me at all, and if I should have friends outside an inner circle at all? All the questions I asked only gave way to—excuse the pun—circular reasoning, centering around the fact that I was convinced that nobody knew me.
At my next therapy appointment, I told my psychologist of the turmoil of the days after I’d seen her. I told her all of the things I’d stressed about and all of the ways I had tried to (unsuccessfully) deal with the stress. After a good half hour of crying, she asked me why I thought an inner circle was so important. I sat opposite from her, offended for a beat, and then confused.
I didn’t know.
I’d become so wrapped up in an idea of friendship and a shape that I was convinced relationships should fit in, that I didn’t even know why I thought so anymore. I questioned my openness and love for others to the point that I became convinced that I needed to close myself off from some friends in order to have “real friends”.
Much time [2026 edit: probably three months?] has passed since the inner-circle crisis of 2017, but I’ve only recently come to a real understanding of what I was looking for. I’ve learned that while there may be someone who knows very little about you, there is nothing wrong with nobody knowing everything about you. The fact of the matter remains that nobody can know enough about you to be the friend that you need to be to yourself. [2026 edit: man, isn’t this just the lesson of life as a spiral?]
With this in mind, consider the following:
Life isn’t long enough for anyone to spend time concealing their truth around certain people. The inner circle? It’s mostly a myth, I reckon. [2026 edit: here I apply the loving disagreement of a fully baked frontal lobe. This version concluded the inner circle mythic entirely because of an overactive (and very productive) shame response that kept the song “I am bad, I am evil, it’s only a matter of time, everyone is going to find out” on a loop for most of my life. The work of disarming shame is tremendous. And really lovely to learn you can do.]
It’s too easy to get caught up in an idea instead of taking action. Waiting for someone to find out your Achilles heel before bumping them up from acquaintance status in your mind, takes away time and opportunity for a friendship to thrive. Achilles was pretty good at hiding his secret, and so are most people, so you could end up holding back on an incredible relationship for ages. In short, I think it’s simple: find the people you connect with, and if it feels right, let them in.
Thank you for reading the Monday LOVE OVER FEAR essay. Essays are published every Monday (free) and Sunday ($9/mo or Pay What You Can beginning on February 15, 2026).
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